Locations hidden by default

Hello folks,

We've grown considerably over the last few days and we've started to receive complaints from a couple users over issues of privacy regarding map locations on the site.

In our next release of Fuzzyshot, we will give all users the ability to set a toggle button on or off to show or hide map locations. Until then, we've decided to make all incoming photos from this point on hidden by default.

If you want to show a photo's location, you will have to log in and show the location for each photo you wish to reveal. We know this isn't an ideal solution but we're hoping it will protect our users' privacy until the next version of Fuzzyshot is released on the App Store.

Thanks for your consideration and continued support.

Better Browsing

Wow, what a week! We've seen all sorts of photos on Fuzzyshot and it's great to see that people are taking photos from all over the world. I hope everyone is having fun with our app.

Just a quick update:
As a photo blogging site, we wanted to make the browsing experience much more enjoyable. And we thought that the current methods of photo browsing were unbearably slow and tedious.

The update we just pushed out just made browsing a WHOLE lot faster. Try it! On the single-photo page, when you click on "next" or "previous" or the main photo, the photos should switch out quickly. So now you can browse an entire post of photos within seconds!

If you have a short attention span, like I do, this really helps.

*Note: Right now, you cannot do this with your OWN photos, only on OTHER people's photos. This feature will be added for owners sometime in the future.

Small congrats

We would just like to say congratulations to our honeymooners. We're happy to have you on Fuzzyshot and we hope we're making it easy for you to share your trip with your friends and family. Your pictures are great!

Photo library dilemma, help us out!

Many of our users have asked for the ability to upload photos from their iPhone photo library. At first this was a very easy decision for us. If everybody wants this feature, why not give it to them?

The problem is, we've been getting feedback from some of our users that tells us NOT to do this feature. They are afraid that adding the ability to upload a photo from the library will change the spirit and meaning of Fuzzyshot. Right now we can guarantee you that *almost* every photo you see on the site is "live" and "in the moment". We can also guarantee you that the photos came from an iPhone versus a regular camera.

Knowing these two things definitely adds to the appeal of Fuzzyshot. Once we open up the application to allow uploads from the library, it *may* introduce photos from people's regular digital cameras or even photos they saved off of the internet.

We want to know what our users think. How will you take advantage of the library upload feature? Will you take photos with the built-in camera and then upload those photos at a later time through the Fuzzyshot application?

Will you sync non-iPhone photos from your computers onto your iPhones in order to upload them to Fuzzyshot?

One thing we could do is only allow the live photos to make it to the incoming photos stream and the public browsing pages. Is this a good enough solution?

Before we push a feature like this onto the app, we want to hear from our users. How do you think this feature will change Fuzzyshot? (Or maybe you think it won't change at all?)

Please leave responses in the comments section of this post.

Thanks for your feedback!

-Founders

Multiple accounts with one email address

Some users have asked us if they could create multiple accounts with one email address. We just made the change to our backend and now you can have as many accounts as you want with one email address!

So go ahead, have two accounts on us.

Search Issues

Just a quick update:

We temporarily took down the searching ability because we were having some problems with it this morning. We're working on it right now and hope to have it up very soon. Thanks for your patience.

Update: Okay search is back. We may have missed a couple photos posted in the last 30 min. but they should be picked up by tomorrow. Thanks!

PG: Quite possibly the worst idea ever

Words I will never forget from Paul Graham: "Out of all the ideas you could build for this platform, this one is quite possibly the worst idea ever."

Wow. Where to begin?

Back in February, we weren't working on Fuzzyshot at all. We were actually building an application for Google's Android platform called QuickMeet which we hoped would revolutionize the way people scheduled events/meetings with each other.

The idea was simple, build a cell phone based invitation service that let users share their estimated time of arrival (ETA) with each other. Imagine you are meeting a couple friends for dinner at 6 p.m. and at 5:50 you could already tell that two of your friends are going to be 30 minutes late!

Isn't that an amazing concept? We came up with this idea because we hated waiting for our friends and wanted a way to know exactly when someone would arrive at a predetermined location.

Between February and April, we toiled away on QuickMeet and managed to submit a working prototype to Google for their Android challenge. Needless to say, we didn't win. After the submission, we scored an interview with Paul Graham and his associates at the Y Combinator office in Mountain View.

At this point we already recognized many of QuickMeet's shortcomings. The biggest one of all was the fact that Android didn't even exist yet. Genius level. We went into Y Combinator with a couple backup ideas but we wasted time talking about QuickMeet when we should have stopped short and pitched something else.

That's when Paul told us how bad our idea was. The idea itself isn't bad, it's just way too early for something like QuickMeet to take off. How many of your friends actually have smart phones? I can't count more than 2-3 of my own friends.

We spent two weeks brainstorming all of our customer pains. A great analogy that helped us out came from one of Kevin's professors at Cal, Jon Burgstone. Don't put the cart in front of the horse. That's when you start out with a technology and then try to find a customer pain that matches it. Great ideas are usually never born because a new technology becomes available - great ideas come from real problems.

Are we solving a customer pain with Fuzzyshot? We think so. We're trying to take photo blogging to a whole new level and our early users like it. We try to keep things really simple and make it easy for users to organize and post photos in a nice blog format. We have tons of neat ideas for Fuzzyshot which we hope to test with our users in the future. So Hacker News, what do you think?

Check us out at Fuzzyshot.com.

We made it to day seven

Amazingly enough, we survived to day seven. This past week has not been without its ups and downs. We encountered a couple critical bugs that kept us up until the morning light made its way through our office blinds, but overall we thought it went better than expected.

We've received many encouraging emails from users that keep us motivated and focused on pumping out new features. We know many of you want to upload photos from your iPhone library so we are working hard on getting an update into the App Store as soon as possible.

In other news, did you know Fuzzyshot was there for TWO deliveries? Imagine our delight when we noticed cute baby photos slowly climbing their way up the most viewed list! We are honored that these two new families picked Fuzzyshot to help them share their bundles of joy with the rest of the world. It's truly a humbling experience. Congratulations to both families.

We want to thank everybody for giving us a chance this first week and telling us what we need to work on. Keep that feedback coming and we promise we'll keep the features coming too.

-Alex, Alvin, and Kevin

Search is back online

Thanks to the anonymous user that messaged us today on Meebo letting us know the search was broken. We just built a new back-end tool that will help us reindex our search every night and we just tested it out!

Looks like it's working pretty well right now. Please report any issues you may find when trying out our search engine.

Caption Editing!

UPDATE: You can now edit post titles on the post view. When you're logged in, you should be able to click on the post title and edit it.

If you are unable to, try clearing your browser cache first and retry. If you are still having problems, don't hesitate to chat with us (http://fuzzyshot.com/chat), or email us (http://fuzzyshot.com/contact).

You can now edit photo captions!

It works the same way as editing your blog title and blurb. When logged in, navigate to a photo and click on the caption. Clicking away should automatically change the caption.

We're working on making the post title editable also, so stay tuned.

Down Time

We had a server issue on Saturday night around 11 p.m. our time. It's back up and everything should be running.

We apologize for the break in service. All the photos you took should automatically upload when you open Fuzzyshot. Give Fuzzyshot a minute or two to finish the photo queue.

Thanks!

Photo of the Day

This one comes from pattymartini, one of our users in NYC.

http://fuzzyshot.com/pattymartini/post/ElQYkAkhGw/photo/M4Lfl3zXtA

This photo reminds me of my summer internship in NYC. Nothing beats walking to the Subway station in 100 degree humidity. :)

Please check out the rest of pattymartini's photos, they are fantastic. It's amazing how far we've pushed the limits of our little iPhone cameras.

How To Reset iPhone Location Warnings

For those of you who want to be able to see that location warning again, here is how you can reset your location warnings: http://fuzzyshot.com/kevin/post/fMsoVfpxdN/photo/ovmvJjTz13

If you want to turn off location completely, you can go to Settings -> General -> Location Services and turn it off from there too. http://fuzzyshot.com/kevin/post/fMsoVfpxdN/photo/qpEpgso8hk

Hide Photo Location Data

We just added the ability to hide a single photo's location data. We know some people don't want all their photos to be mappable so now you can log in and hide the map link from public view.

How to hide a photo's location data:

1. Log in
2. Go to the photo page of the photo you wish to hide
3. If location data is available, you should see a new link above the photo that says "hide map location"

Click on it and presto, nobody will be able to see that "MAP PHOTO" link anymore when they view your photo. Of course you will always be able to see it if you are logged in.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to contact us.

feedback [at] fuzzyshot [dot] com

Photo of the Day

Chosen for color, composition, lighting, and cuteness.

Photo 3 of 4, "A day in august", by casamartin

Update: I had to add one more for comedy: You lookin at me?

Day 2 + international users

I am in complete awe of how many people found out about Fuzzyshot through the App Store. I wasn't expecting very many people to stumble upon our application just by browsing the store, but sure enough they found their way to us.

greenflash has figured out how to add zoom to his iPhone camera.
miclenox is on a road trip!
pmoody09 showed us his stunt dog

What surprises me the most is how many international users we have. Here are a few international users that I remember from the last two days.

From the UK:
David
arneazy
ivyloveu

From China:
lizhenhua

From Japan:
fish

From Canada:
ryontherocks

-Kevin

Duplicate Photo Issue Fixed

We added a fix that should no longer cause duplicate photos to be uploaded to your Fuzzyshot. To be on the safe side, wait until a photo has finished uploading before you exit the application. Unfortunately Apple doesn't let applications run in the background so if you exit Fuzzyshot before the upload completes you will have to start over (not fun on edge).

Log in issues

We notice there are some users who can't sign into Fuzzyshot on their iPhone. We think it's because they may have typed their password wrong on the signup form and since we don't have a password confirm, this can be a problem. (We don't have a password confirm because we wanted to make the signup as quick and easy as possible.)

Two ways to solve this:

1. Go to http://fuzzyshot.com/forgotpass and we'll email you a new password (check spam folder).

OR

2. Email contact [at] fuzzyshot [dot] com and we'll erase your login so you can do it again.

Thanks!

Duplicate Photos

We are noticing an issue with people submitting duplicate photos. In order to reduce the chance that a photo will be submitted twice, please make sure you don't close Fuzzyshot before all your photos are done uploading.

We upload the photos in the background so users can keep shooting. If you close Fuzzyshot while there are still photos in the queue, we remember to upload them next time you open the app.

Duplicates can be deleted through the website by logging in and clicking "delete" next to the photo.

Fuzzyshot Approved By Apple!

Our application was approved by Apple today and will be hitting the App Store very soon. We're not sure exactly when it will show up on iTunes, but we're going to take whatever time we have to go over the website and make sure everything is working.

This is the first product we've ever pushed out so I think it's safe to say that we are very excited.

UPDATE: And we're LIVE! Wow, that was a lot faster than I thought.

App Store Submission

We're submitting our Fuzzyshot application to Apple tonight. We started working on Fuzzyshot at the end of April but we weren't actually able to start on the iPhone application until much later when we got accepted into the iPhone Developer Program.

Working on a website and an application at the same time has been draining but we feel like we've learned so much in the last few months.

We firmly believe in the "release early and often" mentality so we're pushing out what we've got so far which we hope will give users the basic functionality they need to start putting their awesome photos onto the web.

We'll post again when we have more details regarding the approval of our application.

-founders